by Tina Shaw
In the end, hunger drove me out of bed.
I padded out into the hallway and through to an empty kitchen. There was a note on the fridge.
James, I’ve had to go out, but if you are reading this note, then go back to bed RIGHT NOW and get some rest.
Bed rest, right. That should really help. It wasn’t like having the flu. It was my bloody heart, for Christsake. All the bed rest in the world wasn’t going to fix that little sucker.
I looked in the fridge. The note had not helped my foul mood. And what was so urgent that she had to go out anyway, leaving me all by myself? I mean, my heart could’ve gone ‘plunk’ any minute and I could be lying there right now, dead as a doornail. Then how would she feel about ducking off down the road?
I pulled out a bowl of leftover chicken curry. I took it back to bed with me, along with the carton of milk. Yeah, maybe I’d stay in bed all week.
That was when Ryan walked into my room. ‘Hey, Napoleon Dynamite,’ he said by way of greeting. Funny guy. He wasn’t in his uniform, which made me think I’d got my days mixed up and it was really Sunday. But no, yesterday, when Roxy had given me the finger – that was Sunday.
‘How come you’re not at school?’ I muttered, chewing on chicken curry.
He shrugged, slouched himself into my chair at the desk. ‘I’ve got a free morning. Ma asked me to stay here while she went to talk to that doctor you’re always going to see.’
‘She’s gone to see Doctor Brad?’
‘That’s what I said, bro.’ Ryan swivelled my chair, looking bored. ‘So, how’re you feeling?’
It was my turn to shrug. ‘Like crap.’
‘You sure got Mum worried last night.’
There wasn’t much I could say to that. I chugged down some milk, straight from the box. Ryan was watching me with a predatory look in his eyes. He was probably wondering how long before I croaked and he could have my CD collection.
‘What?’ I said, feeling really pissed off at him.
‘Yeah,’ said Ryan, giving the base of my chair an exploratory kick. ‘You should take it easy, with that heart of yours.’
I wanted to say, ‘What would you know about my heart!’ But of course, Ryan did know all about it. Mainly because Mum was always banging on about it. In fact, Ryan must’ve been sick to death of hearing about my heart. I certainly was. We’d all been living with this thing for months now. It wasn’t just about me and my heart. It was affecting other people, too. I had to wonder how much it was affecting Ryan. I picked up the bowl of curry again, wishing he would leave soon and get out of my face.
‘What did you have in mind? You mean, I should stop doing things like ordinary people?’ I said carefully.
‘Something like that.’
‘Maybe you’d like me to stay in hospital, like permanently … I could lie in bed and do jigsaw puzzles and live on jelly.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ grinned Ryan. ‘At least that way you’d keep out of trouble.’
My fork clinked against the bowl. ‘What d’you mean, trouble?’
Ryan leaned forward. ‘A word of advice …’ he said, giving me a dark look.
The food was sticking in my throat. I swallowed with an effort. ‘What?’
‘For your own good, forget about Roxy.’
10
Two days later I was back in the saddle – the Vespa saddle – and heading for school. I was looking forward to hanging out with my mates at lunchtime, and I was really hoping to see Roxy. So soon I was standing outside the Arts block, trying to look cool, while kids wandered past in the sunshine. in approximately four minutes I had to get to German.
‘Hey,’ said a voice behind me, ‘are you waiting for me, Griffen?’
Roxy was standing there, clutching a dilapidated ring-binder, her fingernails glittering flamingo-pink in the light. I flushed as pink as the nail polish.
‘Nah, I’m waiting for my mate – he’s got some German notes for me.’
‘Uh-ha,’ she smiled, seeing right through me. Her two blonde friends were waiting for her over by the library.
‘Look, uh, Roxy?’ My neck was burning hot: I was about to ask a girl out. Act your age, I told myself firmly. How hard could it be? Despite Ryan’s warning, I’d been rehearsing the line all the way to school: D’you wanna go to the movies sometime? Hardly original, I knew it, but I had to start somewhere. I opened my mouth, about to take the plunge, when suddenly the bell went. Damn.
Roxy gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Better go. Can I talk to you later?’
‘Um, sure. D’you mean after school?’
‘Yeah. I’ll meet you at Scottie’s this afternoon.’ The local ice-cream parlour.
I watched as she joined her mates. A burst of giggles wafted across the asphalt as I, too, turned for class. Great. At least I was good for a laugh.
‘Tell me, James Griffen,’ Roxy was saying, licking thickshake off her straw in a way that was totally mesmerising, ‘how far would you go for a girl?’
‘Uh, how do you mean?’ We were sitting opposite each other at one of Scottie’s round tables. ‘In what way?’
‘I mean, what would you be prepared to do – for a girl?’
Her hooded eyes were watching me, making me nervous. What to say? ‘Let me see … I might possibly wade across the Avon.’
She laughed, kind of sharply. ‘Is that all?’
‘Well, my heart, you know,’ I said, feeling my neck go hot, ‘it’s a bit limiting. Though I could dash off a few poems, or something.’
‘Poems,’ she murmured into her thickshake. I felt like she’d set me a test, which I’d just failed. ‘But if that girl, say, was getting hit sometimes. Like somebody, every now and then, would hit her – what would you be prepared to do then?’
There was a delicate pause. Was she talking about herself? Or was she just making up a story to test me?
‘Well, I’d probably try talking to the person who was doing the hitting,’ I said tactfully.
Roxy gave a secret smile. I had no idea what she was thinking. Then she was licking the end of her straw again. I might’ve zoned out for a few seconds, because suddenly she’d changed the subject. ‘People say your brother’s left school.’
That was a surprise.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at me curiously, ‘he’s working on that building site for the new hotel.’
‘That’s the first I’ve heard of him leaving,’ I muttered. And why were we talking about Ryan?
Roxy was looking at me with narrowed eyes. She murmured, ‘People say he’s got heaps of girlfriends.’
‘Nah,’ I said, without thinking, ‘he ditched the last one the other day.’
Roxy stood up, her thickshake half finished. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she murmured. Did I miss something? Suddenly I was being dismissed.
Not all that much later, I’d remember our conversation in Scottie’s, for two reasons.
I got back home to find Ryan at the letterbox, reading a postcard. He was in jeans and work boots, not school uniform.
‘Finished early at the construction site today?’ I asked casually.
He gave me a black look, but said nothing. Then he shoved the card in my direction. It was a picture of boats in a marina, from Perth.
‘Is it from the Aussie family?’ I wondered out loud.
‘Who else?’ Ryan squinted in the sun, as if weighing something up in his mind. ‘She gets one of these every couple of months,’ he added.
‘Really?’ Hm. Our mother liked to keep a lid on certain things. I studied the card with interest.
How’s everything in Kiwi-land? Mike’s got himself a new boat. You guys should come over some time and we’ll take you up the Swan. Cheers, Joyce.
Maybe I’d talk her into taking us over there, after my op.
‘Hey, do me a favour,’ said Ryan, ‘and don’t tell Mum about the job.’
It’s not all doom and gloom, having a bad heart. After the rheumatic fever gig, when it was obvious I wasn’t getting bette
r in a hurry, Mum got hold of a secondhand TV, picked up a cheap DVD player from The Warehouse, and set the whole thing up in my room. She figured I’d be spending more time in bed (proved her wrong on that score).
And besides, she and Ryan didn’t like the same kind of movies as me. Some great old western would be on, like Pale Rider, a real classic, and Mum’d be sitting there sighing because it wasn’t a chick flick starring Julia Roberts, while Ryan would be making facetious remarks for the first five minutes (his attention span for old movies) until he got bored and took off.
So when Ajax came over with a movie that evening, we knew we’d be left in peace. He’d brought a copy of one of our favourites, Tank Girl. Actually, we also liked films that weren’t classics. I mean, there were only so many Clint Eastwood movies you could watch. Tank Girl might not have been the most intellectually stimulating film around, but it sure had some funny gags. Plus tanks. Plus kangaroo men. Plus Lori Petty, who was a babe. Need I say more?
‘I thought about getting Dumb and Dumber,’ said Ajax, flopping into the swivel chair. ‘But I didn’t think you should be laughing too much.’
‘Good thinking,’ I said. ‘I might’ve laughed so hard, my heart would’ve exploded.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Ajax, running a hand over his head. He’d just got a number-two cut and it was obviously taking some getting used to. Gone were the long surfie curls. In one swift move he’d gone from Peter Pan to Velcro Man. ‘Anyway, if your heart exploded, your mum’d blame me.’
‘Yeah, she would, definitely.’
‘And my mum’d probably ground me or something, you know, for making your heart explode.’
‘Highly likely,’ I mumbled, opening a packet of corn chips with my teeth.
‘And she’d stop my allowance, just to make sure I was really suffering.’
‘Yup.’
Ajax pushed the Play button.
‘So your heart better not explode while we’re watching this.’
‘I’ll try and keep it under control,’ I said humbly.
We settled in to watch the movie, me lying on top of the bed, Ajax sprawled on my chair. He tends to sprawl rather than sit, on account of his legs.
At intermediate school he was called Giraffe. I guess he was always a kid who earned nicknames. He might’ve been a great basketball player, except he couldn’t catch a ball if you held a gun to his head. If you threw one at him, it actually seemed to veer away from him at the last minute. Like he had some kind of magnetic field thing happening around him, which balls didn’t like. It was really funny to watch. Other times, the ball just hit him smack in the head.
‘Have you got any cheese in your fridge?’ he asked.
‘Course. Go help yourself.’
Ajax unfolded his legs and ambled out of the room. Meanwhile, Lori Petty was riding her water buffalo across the desert back to the base house.
He came back after a while, with the block of cheese and a sharp knife and proceeded to cut very thin strips off the top of the block. Just in time to see the house get torched and Tank Girl taken hostage by the evil water guys. Then came the cool scene in the plane where she whacked this guy in the face. Though probably my favourite in the movie was the dance scene in the Silver Room with all those girls in silver bikinis singing that old Cole Porter number.
‘Your brother’s out in the kitchen,’ Ajax said after a while. He cut another thin slice of cheese and handed it over to me.
Cheese tasted different when it was sliced very thin. It seemed to make the flavour come out more. You’d think you’d lose the flavour, the thinner you sliced the cheese, but it wasn’t like that at all.
‘Do you think he knows I exist?’ Ajax looked at me. I had to admit, his new look gave him edges.
‘Who?’
‘Ryan – do you think he, you know, registers me? Or am I just an amoeba on his radar screen?’
‘How should I know?’ I mumbled, still thinking about the cheese, and how I could experiment with other kinds to see if fine-slicing improved them as well. ‘Why do you ask?’ I added, more polite than interested.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ sighed Ajax, rubbing his head again. ‘He was just talking on his cell, that’s all.’ He cut another slice of cheese and handed it over. ‘You know, like I wasn’t there.’
I also liked how with a thin slice of cheese your teeth left a very clear impression. ‘Don’t worry about it. He’s like that with me, too. Most of the time. Unless he wants something.’
I took a bite of the cheese and examined the bite mark. My front teeth were extremely even. That was a comforting thought. My heart may have been crapping out, but at least my teeth were good. Some people would kill for teeth like mine. ‘Ryan’s kind of wrapped up in himself and how good he looks and how cool he is. It tends to blind him to other, less perfect individuals such as ourselves. Then of course he’s heavily influenced by his other brain.’
Ajax gave a dry laugh. ‘Not like us, eh?’
‘Not like us,’ I agreed cheerfully. ‘Well, not most of the time, at any rate.’
‘Pass the corn chips,’ said Ajax.
‘I’ll swap you for the cheese.’ We did our swap, and settled back to watching the movie again. ‘So what was he saying on the phone? Not that I’m particularly interested. He was probably chatting up some girl.’ I cut myself a thin slice of cheese. Hm, it wasn’t quite the same when you did it yourself. ‘He’s got all these girls running after him. The other day he had one in his room.’
Ajax looked interested. ‘Yeah? Did you listen?’
‘Of course not,’ I said primly, biting into a fresh slice. I couldn’t seem to get it as thin as Ajax had. ‘Besides, he had the music turned up too loud.’
‘Ah.’ Ajax bit down very loudly on a corn chip. Crumbs fell down the front of his tee-shirt. ‘So anyway,’ he mumbled, ‘I think he was definitely talking to some girl just now.’
Tank Girl and Naomi Watts were escaping from the dusty prison place in a tank. It was very cool. I’d actually forgotten we were talking about boring old Ryan.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ Ajax said thoughtfully. ‘Some girl called Roxy.’
The knife shot out of my hand. It went twang into the floorboards, point first, like a knife-thrower’s shot. Ajax and I just looked at it for a moment. Then he leaned over and coolly pulled it out of the floor. He handed it back to me without a word.
‘Roxy?’ I said weakly.
Ajax nodded. ‘Yeah, you know her?’
It was my turn to nod. We could have been straight out of Dumb and Dumber. ‘What else was he saying? How did he sound?’
Ajax frowned at the screen, thinking. ‘He seemed pretty happy … laughing a lot.’
I’ll bet they both were, I thought.
‘And, um, making plans, to go out.’
‘What kind of plans?’
‘He said he’d meet her somewhere tomorrow at six-thirty.’
‘Meet her where?’
Ajax shrugged. ‘I dunno. He just said, “All right, I’ll see you there at six-thirty.”’ Then he added: ‘How d’you know this girl Roxy, anyway?’
‘She’s just a girl from school.’
He looked up, suddenly putting two and two together. ‘Dude,’ he said, ‘is this the girl you were talking about the other day?’
‘Yeah,’ I said miserably. ‘That’s the girl.’
Even from a distance they made a really cool couple. He was in his faded low-slung jeans and black tee-shirt. She was wearing a pair of tight black pants and a strappy purple top. They just seemed natural together – Ryan and Roxy – in a way she and I could never have been. Even their names started with the same letter, and both names had two syllables. That was a completely meaningless observation, but at the time it made sense. My name boringly had only one syllable. And besides, until I got that op I had no future.
I was sitting on the edge of this big concrete planter, half hidden behind the big leafy thing that was in the planter. A plant, I
thought miserably, picking a leaf off my sleeve. It was a plant in the planter. And I was hiding behind it, spying on my brother and a girl I really liked. How pathetic was that. Just as well my mates couldn’t see me now. Roxy and Ryan were hanging round outside the picture theatre, talking and laughing, though it didn’t look like they were going to the movies. It looked more like they were waiting for somebody.
It hadn’t been hard to find out where they were going.
Around 6.15 I left the house on my trusty Vespa, headed down the road and parked in Ajax’s driveway, to wait behind their garage. Ryan had started getting ready around five o’clock – going through the complex grooming ritual he indulged in before meeting a girl. Even from Ajax’s house, I heard him gun his car to life. The sound roared towards me, and I flicked on my own quiet ignition. When he sped past, I followed him.
Our street was straight and narrow, but just round the corner from Ajax’s was a set of lights. I hoped Ryan would catch red lights all the way into town and I wouldn’t have any trouble following him. And that was pretty much how it turned out. There was an orange at the corner of Bradshaw and Mulberry, but good ol’ Ryan just blitzed that. The next set of lights got him, though, so I was able to catch up. Always several cars behind him, of course, in the best Private Eye tradition.
Now here we were, hanging round in the Square – which was busy. People were going in and out of Hoyts. Cars were cruising the nearby streets. Lights were winking on.
And over by the movie billboards were the happy couple. It looked like Ryan was teasing Roxy about something. He kept leaning towards her, his chin jutting, and she was talking back at him, looking hard and cool. Then he slid his arm round her waist and pulled her towards him. It only took a second, like a dance move. Even though I hated him intensely in that moment, I had to admit he was good.
Then they were kissing. Again it only lasted a moment, and they broke apart. It didn’t look like the first time either. It was too casual for that. Ryan slung his arm possessively across Roxy’s shoulders. He had that strutting look he got when he was really pleased with himself. His girl – that was what it looked like – the hottest chick in school.
